To honor the historic struggle for equality in accordance with Black History Month, Kennedy Library will be hosting an exhibit entitled “Strive and Struggle: Documenting the Civil Rights Movement at Cal Poly, 1967-1975.” The free exhibit will feature Mustang Daily articles from that time period and will be displayed in the first floor gallery of the library from Feb. 2 until March 1.
“This year we’re partnering with history graduate students and with support from the ethnic studies department, both of which have helped us steer in the direction that we’ve gone on the exhibit,” said Catherine Trujillo, library assistant for Special Collections and University Archives.
Special Collections and University Archives in the library stores the majority of the documents that are generated by the university, including Mustang Daily articles dating back to 1906. According to Trujillo, the exhibit was a way to show how students reacted to injustices, both on and off campus, by researching primarily student-produced articles during the Civil Rights Movement.
“The graduate students went back to 1966 and started looking at what the civil rights movement was at Cal Poly,” Trujillo said. “There was a strong movement, not only talking about rights for African-Americans but also protesting the Vietnam War. There was a lot of student activism at that time here on campus.”
Given last quarter’s incident at the crops house, Trujillo is hopeful that students will be able to learn from the exhibit and form comparisons between the incident and similar occurrences from the past.
“I’m hoping that people will see this exhibit and actually see parallels between this incident and maybe incidents that happened during that time,” Trujillo said.
“I’m hoping it will inspire the students now seeing how it was done then because students really do have a lot of power on this campus if they voice their concerns and really create a difference. Knowing the history of this campus, back then and present, students can make a difference and I think you’ll see a lot of parallels.”
Jane Lehr, an assistant professor in the ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies department helped with the exhibit. She plans on incorporating the exhibit into courses she teaches and hopes that the university community can learn from the exhibit, as well.
“However, I believe the exhibit will serve as a resource much more broadly for students, staff and faculty seeking to understand not only our past as an institution, but also strategies for building our future – a future in which attention to diversity and social justice are truly central to our mission as a polytechnic university.”
The exhibit highlights student activism both on and off campus. The archived articles from the Mustang Daily show the impact that the Black Student Union had in the formation of an ethnic studies department and in the hiring of more black faculty members. The articles also document student reactions to nationwide occurrences such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and feature prominent black speakers who were sponsored by Associated Students Inc. to speak to the campus community.
“This exhibit, in many ways, is a call to arms,” Lehr said. “Not only in the sense of providing Cal Poly students with a history of students organizing on this campus – although I imagine that having knowledge of this history might be tremendously empowering for some students as well as faculty and staff -but this exhibit is also a call to arms in terms of the additional research projects it prompts.”
Lehr hopes for additional research in how other groups of students were engaged in social activism at this time.
“The exhibit focuses on African American students at Cal Poly,” Lehr said. “What can we learn from the archives about other students engaged in social justice work at this time? What can this teach us about the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality? Or about the power of allies and coalitions?”
Trujillo agreed. “There are things that students can do, this happened in the past and it can happen in the future,” she said.